


A Magical Promise

by felpereBRanco



Series: One Shots [2]
Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling, X-23 (Comic), X-Men - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Hogwarts, Child Abuse, Clones, Fluff and Angst, Gen, Hogwarts Letters, Human Experimentation, Magic, Mother-Daughter Relationship, Mutants, Weapon X Project, Wizarding Politics (Harry Potter), Wizarding Traditions (Harry Potter), Wizarding World (Harry Potter), Wizards, no beta we die lik men
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-09
Updated: 2021-03-09
Packaged: 2021-03-15 14:28:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,277
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29934810
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/felpereBRanco/pseuds/felpereBRanco
Summary: X-23 still had her mother's blood in her hands when she saw the letter. Hogwarts, it beckoned, and no matter how scared she was of this strange new world of magic andpeople, she couldn't imagine going against her mother's final wishes.So Laura breathed in, and with a heart laced with guilt and naivety,stepped into the 9¾ column.
Series: One Shots [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1858066
Comments: 2
Kudos: 7





	A Magical Promise

**Author's Note:**

> Hey, here's another X-23 fic to soothe your soul. She goes to hogwarts, gets the proper childhood she deserves by accidentally tugging at McGonagall's heartstrings and learns how to be happy without violence. I mean, until Voldy gets in the way and she rips him apart. Hope you like it!

Although no records of such fact exist anymore, James Logan Howlett is, in fact, british. He was born on a stormy day of summer in Alberta, Canada, and Elizabeth, his mother, held him for the first time with tears of joy in her eyes and vowed to protect him until her dying breath .Her husband, John Howlett, cried messily at her side. 

Another little known fact of the Howlett family is that decades before, a young 'Beth, as she was known then, once received quite an unusual letter. 

_You are a witch_ . it revealed to her between lines of the formal invitation to a certain magical school. _You have magic._

She was a "new blood" as they called at that age. Both of her parents were _Muggles,_ but she miraculously received the ability to harness magic to her heart's desire. She studied in a private school in Scotland for 7 years, at which point she met a man named John in a train station. As their love story progressed, she moved with him back to O' Canada, his homeland. 

But magic, curiously, is a finicky thing. _Especially_ british magic. It rules the world as much as it is ruled by those seeking to control it, and poor Elizabeth, in an innocent promise made in nothing but the purest form of a mother's awed love, unknowingly made an incredibly powerful binding pact with her own son, one that, by complete accident, legitimized him as a proud _british_ citizen of Canada, North America. 

Nothing, after all, is stronger than a mother's love. 

Young James, unfortunately, never discovered any of that. On the night of his eleventh birthday, an owl swooped into his house with the stamp of Hogwarts, School of Witchcraft and Wizardry shining on a letter held between its talons.

As fate goes, it wasn't one of Hogwarts' elite avian messengers that at the time was reserved only for noble houses and the purest of blood children. Those were famous for their pinpoint accuracy and an unmovable will to deliver their letters. 

To put it more bluntly, this one was quite stupid. 

The owl dropped its letter near the boy and his mother, not even noticing that the woman laid on the ground motionless in a pool of blood as the boy yelled at a buff and gruff man. 

Letter delivered, the owl assumed, its mission was accomplished and now it would fly back fourteen hours to receive its reward in forms of oily clumps of bacon and perhaps, if it was lucky, even a live rat!

That letter was never opened. Young James ran that very night in his pajamas, carrying nothing but the knife Thomas Logan used to murder his ex-lover, Elizabeth Howlett, and her husband. Young James also never went to Hogwarts, never even learned of its existence. He lived for a very long time before being captured by an increasingly paranoid government at the height of the Cold War, escaping by the skin of his teeth and with sharp claws now coated in metal.

James, whose memories had been lost to time except for the bastard name of his father, never met the magical world either. Instead, he created a new life by the name of Logan. He found a private professor that promised him his past, that taught in a school not unlike the one his own mother had enrolled into centuries ago, for gifted youngsters and those with queer skills that made living with natural humans rather… complicated. 

Still, the magic persisted. Despite his own ignorance, James Logan Howlett, now also known as Wolverine, never stopped being a member of the magical society of England. Magic, once it takes its hold on you, is like a dog with a bone: It never truly lets go. 

And such, when Logan birthed a daughter out of wedlock, Hogwarts Registry, the spelled book that stored the names of all students that had and would come to study under the most famous magical school on Earth, noted that down. The girl was not yet named, but the floating quill reached out to the strings of fate and wrote it all the same. 

_Laura X-23 Kinney._ The Book registered. She was now a proud student of Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry.

What the magic didn't know was that Laura wasn't exactly Logan's daughter, she was his clone. His own DNA, birthed in the womb of a Hydra scientist. She had been made to become an assassin to the highest bidder, a perfect weapon at the beck and call of the one percenters. She was made to become _Weapon X._

Eleven years later, X-23 was given her final mission. One Dr. Kinney, with a heavy heart and head clouded by guilt, slid a folder into her cell, full of pictures of a monster by the name of Zander Rice. He was the man responsible for the experiments she suffered, by the operations that ripped out the sharp bones out of her arms and feet _one. by. one_. to coat them in the same metal her father sported. He was the one who forced her to learn how to fight, only to order her to murder her own master. That tortured her until she went on a fit of rage whenever she smelled a specific scent so similar to lavender, a "Trigger Scent" as he called it. 

Her mother wanted this man dead, she slid the folder into her cell just like every other mission she aced, and this time X-23 was very happy to oblige.

Her escape was full of obstacles. For the first time she found herself making decisions based on her own emotions. She destroyed the birthing chamber that held her unborn sisters, X-24 to X-37, because she discovered she could not forgive herself if she allowed anyone else to endure what she went through.

The thought was alien to her, the mere idea of compassion and guilt, but she committed herself to the action. She fought her jailor, an unbreakable woman simply known as Kimura. She hunted, tracking Rice down in the maze-like corridors of The Facility and murdered him. 

And as the girl escaped her old home, an owl magically approached. This one was, in fact, one of the Hogwarts' elite avian messengers. He flew under the gunfire and dived between the guard’s legs until he arrived into an office, using the very essence of magic to guide his movements seconds before the door closed. There was a folder sitting on that desk, with fake passports, documents revealing everything the doctor knew of his charge's progenitor and an informational package for a school called Xavier Institute. 

A woman, who the owl knew was the mother of the girl whose letter he was supposed to deliver, had her back turned, so quietly, the owl flew into the desk and dropped the letter inside the folder, trusting the magic that guided him, and accidently got the muggle school's papers stuck in his talons. 

The woman turned, and found an empty room. 

She grabbed the folder she had prepared for her daughter and ran, not realizing its contents had been switched. 

The escape went on. 

When the red vanished from her vision and the girl found herself above her mother’s corpse with claws painted red, she cried. _It was Rice_ , she realized, _it must be_. He slipped the scent into her mother's tea before Laura managed to slit his throat. 

He did this, one final act of revenge from beyond the grave, and because of him her mother's blood was now in her hands. 

She ignored the lingering smell of Trigger Scent coating Dr. Kinney, and reached for the folder splattered with blood with trembling hands. 

_“You showed me that we can choose to be something other than what we are forced to be, that we can be something better than we believe we are.”_ The letter said. 

_“I'm sorry I waited so long to tell you these things. There is so much more I want to tell you, and I will, but one thing that you must always remember, no matter what has happened and no matter what may come:_

_You are a child, not a weapon._

_You are_ my _child. You are my daughter, and I love you._

_I will always love you, Laura.”_

After allowing herself to grieve, to understand these emotions that bubbled within her chest, the rage, the… the _guilt,_ Laura read the second letter.

Her mother loved her, her mother wanted her to be a child, and her mother enrolled her in this school because that’s what she wanted for X-... For _Laura_.

In that moment, all her thoughts of vengeance fell from her mind, her dreams of meeting Wolverine, her creator, the man whose existence cursed hers and murdering him so nothing like this would ever happen again became less of a priority than fulfilling her mother’s last will. 

Laura trembled with fear when she thought of going out into the world, the crowds, the people talking to her, but if that’s what her mother wanted…

It was a struggle, for sure. 

She sneaked into England in the baggage compartment of a plane, with blue fingers frozen from the cold and actually dying several times before regenerating due to the pressure. She walked through the streets of London feeling the urge to pop out her claws whenever someone looked her way, and felt like crying whenever they stopped her to ask about her parents. _Couldn’t they just leave her alone? Couldn’t they see she had a mission?_

She didn’t feel alright. Her breaths would come short, frantic every once in a while, when she found herself isolated in the middle of a crowd and the desire to stop, to just give up and go back to the Facility, or to run into the wilds and _hide hide hide_ sometimes overwhelmed her, but she killed the only woman who could ever love a weapon like her and if she could do anything to earn forgiveness...

 _"To avoid detection by Muggles,"_ Whatever that was _"please use the entrance located at King Cross Station Downtown London, on platform 9¾."_ said the letter.

The hidden message wasn’t hard to crack, but it took a week of Laura carefully watching the third pillar between platforms 9th and 10th before she saw a woman walking _into the wall._ She waited a few minutes, noticing more and more families walking through this invisible entrance before she followed. 

She passed through the… portal carefully, touching a finger first, then testing her arm in case it suddenly cut off and then she took two quick steps inside. 

The place was horrifying. Adults constraining children in chokeholds, families forced apart as children waved from the windows of a train and everyone seemed to be baring their teeth all the time. 

X-23 was unsettled, every nerve in her body tensing up. It was too loud, the laughter, the bagage wheels rolling, the steam coming off the train. She wanted to cover her ears and curl into a ball, ride it out, but she forced herself to enter the train in shaky steps, taking a look around to try and mimic the body language around her. She didn’t have a trunk, or the uniform, but it wasn’t hard to sneak inside and shut herself into an empty compartment. 

The sudden silence once the door closed was _heavenly_. She didn't even care that this soundproofing technology was leagues ahead of everything she's seen on The Facility, she just felt relieved for the moment of peace.

X- _Laura_ immediately put her back to the corner and closed her eyes, focusing on her breathing, trying to pace herself. She was sitting in a red seat. There was space for trunks on top. She could see the sky through the window. She sharpened her ears, hearing only her own breathing, the shuffling of clothes as she moved. Her claws popped and she immersed herself in the quick painful bite on her knuckles, the way her leg still trembled. 

Slowly, she calmed herself down using the techniques her mother taught her during the few moments the Doctor could sneak into her cell.

She released a long breath and settled in for the journey. It wasn’t a short trip, but Laura was used to lying in wait for long stretches of time. 

She hunkered down on her seat and put herself in the mindset of a stake out, she analyzed the place around her, pierced together what she’d seen to try and prepare herself for whatever awaited her. Did the school know she was coming? That her mother died? She didn’t have books, or a uniform, things that a quick trip to the library showed were essential to attending classes. Would they understand her situation? If not, how could she acquire these assets?

Stepping out of the train was a bizarre experience for Laura. She had indeed expected to see an expensive college, or the students in formal uniforms, but it was more than that. 

She could see them controlling their mutant abilities with wooden sticks, she could hear the giant man’s footsteps, the one calling for the first year students (Does he mean her? She doesn’t know, but she follows him anyway. The other kids around the mutant were in the same age bracket as her.) 

She boards the boat that moves without a motor still wearing a ragged pink T-shirt with a cartoon Unicorn over the gray bodysuit the Facility forced her to use during missions, the one that looked like a monochrome of Wolverine’s uniform but with blood red slashes on each side, and a dirty backpack with unicorn pins she stole from a kid back in Alaska. 

All the other kids look at her strangely, but she doesn't care. This is her, this is her mission, and she would cut down anyone who got in her way. 

No one actually said anything though, so she assumes all's fine and moves on. 

Laura is impressed by the castle, the pretty lights and the stunning view, but she doesn’t let it show, glaring at it intensely while considering the best ways to infiltrate the building.

A woman dressed in a bright gown greets them once they land. She tells them they were to be sorted into houses before her eyes land on Laura and she frowns. 

“Excuse me,” She calls out, muscles twitching in a way Laura knew meant disapproval; Judgement; Pity. “Where’s your uniform?” Professor McGonagall asks. Laura doesn’t answer. 

She shrugs instead.

It’s a new word for her, a motion she started seeing often the closer she got to big cities. It’s a light shake of the shoulders, curling one’s body into itself like a flinch. It’s used to show confusion or as an alternative to “I don’t know.” But more than that, it’s a jerky movement, without fluidity, meaningless. It’s… human, and simple, but Laura shook her own shoulders slightly and curled within herself as if Rice was in front of her about to stab her, and suddenly she feels so… so… So _proud_ , because she just used something she learned from watching people _not_ to kill, not to further Rice’s ambitions but to _socialize._

Exactly like her mother wanted her to. 

And if she can learn how to shrug she can learn how to talk, how to have friends and how to be a daughter like Dr. Kinney wanted to teach her, can’t she? 

To McGonagall, though, the gesture isn't very appreciated, so to say. She frowned darkly, irritated by the cheekiness of the child, and gave the girl a quick once over, noting the obviously muggle clothing and the lack of a trunk. 

"Girl, did your parents not take you to Diagon Alley?" She asked pointedly. 

Laura shook her head. 

"No, ma'am." She answered, straightening her posture and falling back in the old habits beaten into her at the shrill voice. To her own horror, the words poured out of her in the quick, concise format of a mission debrief. 

"I was never told where that is. I would attempt to investigate possible locations and assets, but I only managed to enter the country three days ago." She relayed. Madame McGonagall blinked, surprised. 

"Where are you from?" She asked, before checking the paper she held in her hands. 

"Canada, ma'am." Laura answered. Madame McGonagall shook her head with a sigh before waving her off. 

"Very well. I need to continue on with the sorting, but find me after the feast so we can resolve this issue, understood?" Laura nodded, and the woman let the matter rest, opening the giant doors and beckoning the children forward. 

As the crowd moved deeper into the Great hall, the children looked up at the magical sky, eyes darting around in wonder and amazement. Laura could admit to being stunned by the sight, but she couldn't stop herself from fixing her gaze on the students sitting on the tables and surrounding her, focusing on their hands and hips for sharp objects or suspicious bulges underneath the black robes. 

Laura found nothing, although most of them carried the so called wands openly, leaving them over the table or blatantly waving it around. 

She stopped, staring at the strange talking hat as it yelled a word whenever McGonagall put it over the head of a child. She wondered what kind of attributes this sorting was based on, but she let the thought go. 

"Laura Kinney!" She was called. Hesitantly, with tense muscles and looking suspiciously at anyone near her, she walked up to the throne and sat, watching expectantly as the professor put the machine over her head. 

Instead of the word determining which of the four tables she would sit, the hat emmited a loud shriek, a horrified sound. The people in her immediate proximity jumped, frightened, while the students at the table looked at her as if they knew of her past. 

"Get me off! Get me off!" It yelled. Laura coiled, snarling as she readied herself to jump out of the chair claws first at the first sign of attack as the professor snapped herself off the stupor and quickly pulled the hat away. The shrieking stopped, there was a long silence in which Laura waited for action, and then the hat coughed, imitating the sound of someone clearing their throats off. 

"I apologize." It said sheepishly. Laura frowned, glaring at it suspiciously. "I wasn't expecting… _that._ " It said pointedly, twisting itself in Madame Mcgonagall's grip as to face her. "Never have I seen a child with such a tragic past before." It revealed in a quieter voice than it's loud booming tone, but it echoed across the suddenly mute hall. "You would proudly represent any of the four houses, but your loyalty toward your mother is… astounding. Depressing, but astounding." Laura didn't understand the emotions swirling inside her at the statement, but she knew enough to know she didn't deserve that praise. 

"I am sorry. I can only hope that the badger proves itself worthy of you." He said gently, before twisting itself toward the rest of the room. 

"HUFFLEPUFF!" It yelled, suddenly, startling students and teachers alike a second time. 

After a second, Madame McGonagall gently pushed Laura out of the seat and toward the yellowish table. The girl followed, hesitantly sitting down in an empty spot by the corner. The other children sitting to her left watched her, not knowing whether to offer sympathies or stay quiet. Laura ignored them, watching the hat with a hawklike gaze as it was put over the next child's head. 

"Gryffindor!" 

And so it continued.

**Author's Note:**

> Hey, if you're a fan of Laura don't forget to check out my other oneshots of her finding a good life in the world of Skyrim ([ Shout of Freedom ](https://archiveofourown.org/works/26598367)), The Boys([ Motherly Instincts](https://archiveofourown.org/works/29832018)) and RWBY(No Way Out, but that one is older, tbh). 
> 
> And here's my [ Tumblr ](http://felperebranco.tumblr.com)


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